Fostering a newborn will benefit everyone

Foster parents must provide children with unconditional love and equal treatment for them to thrive.

ABU DHABI // Fostering a newborn baby has benefits for the baby, the family and society as a whole, experts said.

Foster parents must provide the children with unconditional love and equal treatment for them to thrive.

Dr Veena Luthra, a consultant psychiatrist at the American Centre for Psychiatry and Neurology in the capital, said fostering a newborn baby was the ideal situation.

“The newborn can easily attach to the foster parent and has not yet had the negative experiences of being neglected or traumatised,” she said. “For the foster parent, too, it is easier to bond with the newborn and provide a caring and stable environment from the start.

“It is easier to form a secure attachment with the child, which sets a solid foundation for the child’s future relationships.

“It is a very rewarding experience for the foster parents, too, who are involved in caring for the child from birth.”

Dr Luthra said fostering a child provided love and care in a family setting that was not found in an orphanage. In most cases, children who are kept in orphanages have issues of neglect, abuse and attachment problems.

The absence of a secure relationship in the first few years of a child’s life can cause children to become withdrawn and have trust issues and relationship problems when they grow up, she said.

Fostering a child also has benefits for parents.

“The child brings joy and happiness in your life and it feels good to help someone in need,” Dr Luthra said. “It also helps one’s children learn to share and interact with a child with a different background and teaches them the importance of giving back to your community and society.”

It is important that foster children be accepted by society and not reminded of their past, said Dr Rima Sabban, associate professor at the College of Sustainability Sciences and Humanities at Zayed University’s Dubai campus.

“Children require a lot of care, attention, love [and] emotional feelings to grow. They are dependent human beings till they reach minimum puberty, so somebody has to care for them,” she said. “If they are in a family, they will be in a more natural atmosphere to grow up healthy, and would have good affection and ambition. They will be raised properly and they won’t become problematic.

“If the child is abused, or looked down at, if the child is reminded of his childhood, that might create issues. Usually foster children need some kind of extra help and support to fit in the society. More importantly, they need to feel loved and cared for, and that they are important to the family.”

They must not feel like the family is doing them a favour by fostering them, she said.

Fair family treatment would allow the children to flourish in life, Dr Sabban said.

“If the child is treated properly he will have a future that at least is closest to a normal childhood. It is important to have him treated equally, like other children in the family, to have him play with other children,” she said.

Parents who cannot conceive gain the opportunity to “have a child” this way, Dr Sabban said.